Unmanned Vehicles: Towards Heterogeneous Hardware Approaches

In this paper, we propose and evaluate several details of using heterogeneous hardware in Unmanned Vehicles (UV). We take advantage of a previous UV general proposal, and identify several problems of using a single hardware (for "doing it all") platform. A single low cost and well-known computing hardware such as Arduino or Raspberry Pi is not enough for a large number of applications, so we take advantage of each hardware in terms of Arduino real-time processing and Raspberry Pi software development and high-level interfaces. Furthermore, we experiment on specific limitations which imply that a single hardware approach would be more expensive in terms of cost, development, and maintenance work. Interestingly, the general UV approach is not changed, it is only adapted in specific scenarios and applications. We focus on the characterization of such scenarios for maintaining a methodological UV construction.